Infineon Technologies is supplying its semiconductor-based security chips in effort to support Taiwan’s new electronic passport program. This is the second major project driven by the government of Taiwan that relies on security chips from Infineon.

Infineon is the single supplier and has started shipping security chips of the SLE78 product family based on the digital security technology Integrity Guard, designed to offer particularly solid protection against unauthorized data manipulation.

With Integrity Guard by Infineon, the card holder personal data is stored and processed by security chips integrated into the smart cards and electronic documents. Personal data is not only stored but also processed in encrypted form. Should a unit detect that an operation has not been properly executed, for example if somebody tries to manipulate the data, the ongoing processes are immediately stopped.

Taiwan has been issuing one million electronic passports per year to its approximately 23 million citizens since 2008. The passports have a validity of ten years and comply with latest ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) standards for travel documents.

According to Acuity Market Intelligence, the Asia Pacific ePassport and eVisa market will achieve $4.2 billion annual revenues by 2014 with an impressive CAGR of 47 percent through 2014. Acuity projects that Asia will displace Europe as market leader dominating both revenue and volume market share.

ID cards, passports, health cards and driving licenses increasingly are being issued in the form of electronic documents, comprising a security chip, in order to protect them more effectively against counterfeiting and falsification while increasing convenience for the ID holder.

In addition, more than 25 million Infineon pieces have already been shipped for the electronic health cards of the Taiwan Health Care Project.